In the Wink of an Eye

Lieutenant Scott Thompson and Captain James Knott burst into the small house accompanied by a swirl of snow and a blast of cold air, which made their wives quiver and distracted the Lieutenant’s daughter, Kathy, from the book she was attempting to read. Scott removed his cap, and a thick thatch of black hair sprung upright giving the appearance of a man constantly surprised. He winked at his daughter, then hung his hat and great coat on an iron hook near the front door.

“Brr, it's cold outside, Sybil!” said Scott to his fine-boned wife, who momentarily appeared to him as a wild flame, her ginger curls incandescent in the gloom of the adjacent kitchen where she fussed about at the range, assisted by Mrs. Knott, both neighbor and the captain's wife.

“You are fools to be traipsing around outside in weather like this,” said Sybil, blushing at the realization that she'd hurled an insult at her husband's commanding officer. “Oh, but forgive me, Sir!” she gushed, holding her hands to her face.

The captain chuckled, “think nothing of it, Sybil. We men of the sea are brave and foolish in equal measure.” 

Sybil removed a fresh-baked loaf from the oven, Mrs. Knott carried bowls of steaming beef stew to the table. Little Kathy pushed aside Grimm’s Fairy Tales and kneeled on a stool opposite her father, her face cupped in her hands, the same jet-black hair falling about her ears, though in ringlets.

“Father, what does it mean when you close one eye and not the other in this manner?” asked Kathy, contorting her face to one side but squeezing both eyes shut, which made the captain burst out laughing.

Scott pretended deep consideration of the question, “It means that you are sharing a secret that others cannot understand", he said, mollifying Kathy.

“What secret can a child of such age and innocence possibly have?” said Mrs. Knott, pushing a lock of hair from Kathy’s forehead, “A Celtic beauty, much like her mother, though of a different hue."

The small saltbox house glowed with warmth and cheer while outside gentle snow settled as a blanket, burying all but the granite cross in the small cemetery across the way. “It was a rum thing, was the loss of the Brig St Regis,” said the captain looking out the fron window at the memorial stone, “the storm of '89 threw the vessel upon Grampus ledge and the ocean swell broke over the crowded deck, each wave claiming a quota of souls.” The captain looked down at the bowl of stew as if it were the tempest itself.

Mrs. Knott interrupted him, “Captain! We are in the company of a child!” she said, then more soothing, “perhaps you can tell the story at another time, dear?” She patted his forearm. 

But the Captain had stirred things up. The turbulent Atlantic and the terror it wrought hit Sybil like a tidal wave. “Must Scott leave in the morning? It is so cold, and the ocean currents bear upon the land with such vigor. Perhaps the inbound man will be delayed?” she said, looking directly at the captain, blushing again for her forwardness and drawing from Scott an anguished sigh.

The men were grim and silent for there was nothing to be said that had not been said many times before by men about to go to sea. Scott broke the silence with a show of good humor, “this food is surprisingly good!” he said, which changed the subject and changed the prevailing sentiment from morbidity to mild outrage.

“How can you declare this food surprisingly good!” said Captain Knott, taking up the cause of righteous indignation, “it is not surprising, it is excellent.”

“But Captain, you miss my meaning. I have lofty standards!” said Scott with a broadening grin spreading across his narrow face, “and yet I am still surprised". Sybil rolled her eyes at his lame wit.

When it came to clearing the table, Scott gave his wife a kiss, shook hands with Captain Knott, plucked Kathy from her seat and bore her aloft, clutching the little thing to his heart like a rag doll. Up the narrow staircase he stomped.

Scott propped his daughter up with a plump pillow and sat beside her on the bedstead in the small room with the window that overlooked Cohasset Bay and the lighthouse out on Grampus Ledge. One flash, four flashes, three and a pause, a staccato winking light over the ocean, over and over, forever. They sat in quiet contemplation of the three secret words they had settled on as its meaning.

“Tomorrow I must go to the lighthouse, Kathy, and do my duty as keeper, and you must care for your mother while I am gone,” he said, smoothing the locks from her brow so that he could clearly see her in the mean light of the crescent moon.

“I will miss you terribly, Papa” she said grasping at his hand.

“And I you,” said Scott, “but I am always with you, winking at you with yonder torch, forever.”  

“Forever!” exclaimed Kathy, winking at him as best she could.

+++

It was a clear and sunny February morning. The snow lay thick and encrusted on the ground, treacherous in places. At the harbor, the Lighthouse Keepers' sailing skiff sat low in the water, heavily laden, the water slapping up at the gunnels.

“It is a common thing for the waves to lunge at us and for the spray to dash up,” protested Assistant Keeper Channing, just returned from two weeks at the Ledge, where the water did more than slap.

The journalist from the Boston Globe was dismissive, “is it not the case that the foundations vibrate, that the edifice sways and might topple?” The cost of the new Lighthouse remained a subject of public controversy, and therefore a magnet for readers seeking distraction from news of war in Europe. He turned to Captain Knott who was standing alongside his subordinate, “and is it not true that the windows are regularly bashed in?” 

“These reports are mortifying and place us in a bad light,” said the captain, “we are as safe on the ledge as you are at home in bed, and – for that matter – what would you have us do? Have you forgotten the fate of the St. Regis so soon?” he said, but the journalist cared little for yesterday’s news and the meeting ended with the uniformed men unable to dissuade him further muckraking.

Harborside, beyond earshot, Scott waved to Sybil, who stood on the elevated observation deck wrapped in thick clothing, holding Kathy on her hip. Beside her stood Mrs. Knott, erect and stony faced, honoring in a practiced way the bravery of men as they set to sea. Scott waved at his wife and winked at his daughter and threw them a kiss as he boarded the small boat.

Kathy shouted something to her father, but her words were swallowed up by the jitter of the rigging, the complaining ropes, and the bellowing of the stevedores as they unloaded sacks of potash from a Carolinas barge, and it was amidst this cacophony that the small sailing skiff cast off and carried the pale-faced, shock-haired Scott out to the Ledge.

Captain Knott joined Sybil and his wife on the frigid observation deck. “You must not tarry in the cold, all is well,” he said gruffly, steering the womenfolk to the waiting sled, which carried them crisply homewards to Cohasset, where they arrived just as the advanced clouds of a new weather system appeared on the horizon.

+++

The mercury huddled down, the barometer pointed beyond stormy, pushed by a sinister hand, and at nightfall the advance battalions of the sou'-wester were nearing land, bringing with them a marrow-chilling weaponry. To Sybil’s eye, the lighthouse appeared in vignette, more a ghostly absence than a reassuring presence, though pinpricks of light flashed through the thick air.

“It is Papa!” said Kathy, “he winks at me though the storm!” she sat upright in her bed as she had the prior night with her father.

“What message in this winking, do you suppose?” asked Sybil, tapping the bedstead in time with flash of the distant and obscuring lighthouse. 

“It is a secret,” said Kathy, turning on her side and closing her eyes, “a forever secret.” In moments she was asleep.

+++

The storm hit New England with wrath scattering the birds before it and scouring the land. It thrashed against the side of the small house, tore tiles from the roof, spat ice through fissures, crashed up against the windows and doors. Sybil sat in Kathy’s room, prayerful through the small hours, fitful until the first hint of dawn when diminishing fury in the elemental force released her from constant vigil and she fell asleep.

“Mother,” Kathy was shaking Sybil’s arm, and whispering in her ear, “The lighthouse! It is gone!”

Sybil looked out the window in the direction of the Ledge and caught her breath at the blankness, the blown-out remnants of the tempest. It took her a few moments to gather her senses. “It is a fog, dear child” she said, “it will clear soon.”

+++

But the gelid fog hung over the icy coast like a malignant malaise. Eyes knew not where to focus in the mirk, there being no substance nor visible edge to things. News and information came slowly to the town in diffuse globules, their provenance and meaning unclear. From out of this gloom emerged Geraldine, a forty-foot lamp-gray collier from Philadelphia, bedraggled, draped with icicles, she drifted serenely to the dock, belying the terror and hardship that the tempest had thrown at the beaten, frost-bit crew. “We made it here blind”, shouted the first mate to the dockmaster, “we nearly ran aground at the ledge and then again at the breakwater. It is God’s hand that guided us to safe harbor because the lighthouse… well, it is gone, and so is our deckhand, young Jack Yates, washed overboard in the tumult of the bay”.

Captain Knott was called down to hear the calamitous news and he quizzed the sorry crew for details, but their answers were various, incomplete and inconsistent, promising hope and despair. He instructed Lieutenant Channing to prepare for a mission to the lighthouse, to help Lieutenant Thompson with urgent repairs as necessary and to recover the corpse of young Yates.

The sailing vessel soon slipped away from the dock and into the enveloping fog, Channing at the fore, the black-clad pilot at the tiller.

+++

News of a disaster went from the dockside to the town, along the roads and highways by foot or by sled, changed in the retelling, aggrandized in one direction, diminished in the other, but the version delivered to the small house in Cohasset was spare and benign, conveyed there directly by Captain Knott's messenger boy. Sybil’s heart inflated with hope at news of the expedition, so she and Kathy dressed in warm clothing and hurried to town, walking through snow until conveyed the last mile by the postal sled. At the dusky waterfront, they were met by a taciturn Mrs. Knott, for whom the situation seemed altogether bleaker, though she kept her own counsel.

Captain Knott exited his office and stood on a parapet above. He placed his eye to a tripod-mounted scope and probed through the vapors in the direction of the Ledge, when suddenly the fog lifted, and the lighthouse appeared small and distinct from out of the gloom. Was it proud and tall? Was it steadfast and determined? None at the harborside could tell for sure with the naked eye in the half-light, but there it was.

“Mother, mother It is Papa, he is winking at me,” said Kathy. She jigged about, her boot heels thumping on the dock. Sybil could not quite make out the flashing light, only feint scintillations that hinted at it. She clenched the child’s hand tightly and turned to Mrs. Knott, “I’m sure our Scott must have a tale to tell”, she said, seeking validation of the overture of emotion that played within her heart, but Mrs. Knott was looking not toward the Lighthouse, but towards her own husband.

“How can you see him from this great distance?” asked Sybill, turning back to her daughter, marveling at the child’s keen eyesight. “What does Papa say, darling? What is this secret between you two silly heads?

“It is the same forever secret, the one, four three,” said Kathy.

Above, on the parapet, the captain caught his breath. He had seen something that he did not like.

“What is it, Captain?” called Mrs. Knot, sensing something amiss. 

“Channing must have stayed at the Ledge, because I can only see the pilot”, he said, pensive, as if talking to himself, but in the next instant he cried as if struck by a blow to the chest; he shrank from the telescope, wan-faced and stiff-limbed, clutching at his heart.

The skiff progressed through the still water toward the dock, the funereal pilot stood at the tiller as in mourning, head bowed, exchanging neither words nor gesture with a cluster of dockside onlookers, who, at the approach of the skiff and revelation of its contents, withdrew from the horror, just as Captain Knott had done moments before. Lying as ballast along the bottom boards of the skiff, covered partially by sail cloth, a corpse lay rudely, the parchment skin blue and white, the thin face upward turned, adorned with a black shock of hair and unseeing dark eyes that stared at the blank sky, unwinking. 

Little Kathy was staring elsewhere, not at the skiff but at the Lighthouse, now framed by inky darkness, “Mother, the light seems to fade, but still it winks the forever secret,” she said.

Sybil could not see the blinking light of which her daughter spoke because her vision was veiled by upwelling forever tears.